Feature Focus: Short Descriptive URLs

Look up; at the top of the window. Up in the address bar is the URL of this website. Have you looked at the addresses that your website is using? Your church is probably using a system (CMS) that automatically creates the URL for a page based on a template. Usually the default is for ugly unusable URLs. However, with most of the popular CMSs there are options to change the way URLs are structured.

But why does it matter how it’s structured? It’s important to have short descriptive URL for your church website since they make it easier for visitors to remember the address, and help with better placement in search results. In a newsletter it’s easier for a reader to remember www.somechurchwebsite.com/cookout then www.somechurchwebsite.com/?p=21 because the URL is cleaner and more readable. Also search engines look in the URL for keywords, so having descriptive words in a URL (most likely based on the page title) will help your rankings.

In fact the Church and Web Network just got a short, clean URL of network.crcna.org/web that redirects to the longer address. And if you look around you'll see that each item (article, blog post, resource, ...) has a URL that includes it's Network and the title of the item. This is common and a good example of approriate URLs.

So take a look at your website, and ask away in the comments if you need guidance on how to change how the URLs are structured on your site. Or if you already have done this how are URLs structured on your site? 

This is the first blog post in the Feature Focus series. This series will provide you with quick tips on how to refine your church’s website and online presence. Look for these posts about every other week and visit this Topic for list of past Feature Focus posts.